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Apparently not a single education reporter for the BBC, The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun or The Daily Mail actually know how A-level exam grades are awarded. And I suspect if I looked at other news sites, I would find the same (depressing) result.

A level grades are not given out solely based on percentage of marks gained in an exam! If this years A-level maths is truly easier than last years, then candidates will need to score more marks to get an A. If this years paper is harder than last years, then candidates will need to score less marks. It’s simply not possible for them to write papers of the same difficulty each year. Even in subjects like maths, they can’t simply take the previous papers and change the numbers in the questions, because then people would simply need to learn the techniques tested in the previous years papers, and not the entire syllabus.

The confusion arises because people do like to compare things from one year to the next. Most people would agree that someone getting 86% on an ‘easy’ paper has less knowledge than someone who got 78% on a ‘hard’ paper. In fact the 86% might have been a B, but the 78% was worthy of an A…

Because of this the exam boards map the raw marks onto something called the UMS (uniform mark scale). So someone who scored the minimum marks for an ‘A’ on their particular year’s exam will receive 80/100 on the UMS. Someone who scored halfway between the grade boundaries of ‘A’ and ‘B’ for their particular year, will receive a UMS score of 75/100. Students receive their UMS score, not their raw marks. IQ tests work in a similar way – the actual ‘score’ given by a test depends on the difficulty of the particular test, and not just how many questions you got right.

You can’t say that a UMS score of 80/100 is 80%. The numbers just don’t work that way.

QCA even explain this themselves…

Whether or not the standards expected for a particular grade have gotten softer over the years is another matter entirely…

The BBC have got a news story on their website at the moment about a game being pulled from shelves for causing offence:

A video game which uses a term abusive to people with disabilities is being pulled by its manufacturer.

MindQuiz, a brain training game for the Nintendo DS handheld console, was released in the UK by French software giant Ubisoft in March 2007.

However, poor performance in one section sees the player labelled in an offensive manner.

The company has apologised “to anyone who was offended by the game” and said it will withdraw it.

“As soon as we were made aware of the issue we stopped distribution of the product and are now working with retailers to pull the game off the market,” a spokesperson said.

“The game was developed in Japan, and we unfortunately did not pick up on the offending word in our quality assurance. We are currently working with the developer to find a way to rectify the issue.”

The problem emerged after a Belfast woman contacted BBC Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show.

Nicola told the show she had been playing the game – aimed at ages three and above – to pass the time while in hospital giving birth to her baby son, Austin, four weeks ago.

It was a fraught time for the young mother, who had lost her other son, Logan, just before Christmas.

The three-year-old – who suffered from cerebral palsy and was severely brain damaged – passed away after contracting pneumonia.

Nicola was shocked when she had performed poorly at one part of the game and it rated her efforts in a manner derogatory to the disabled.

“I thought it was absolutely appalling that a word like this should be used to describe someone who has not achieved very well,” she said.

“My daddy also has cerebral palsy and he is in his mid-50s and this is a word that really offends my dad.”

So what’s the word that caused the offence? Spastic? Retard? Something else? The mystery word is the entire point of this story!

It actually offends me that it hasn’t been published for what I can only assume is ‘fear of causing offence’. It’s a news website – if anyone is offended by any word when used in a strictly reporting context (x said y), then they need to grow up and live in the real world. Should we ban dictionaries?

Bah. I’ve made an official complaint to the BBC – wonder if they’ll get back to me…